[News] Lost in Transformation: RGS Session_2026_Call

[Jan Stanislaw Winkler]

Liebe Kolleginnen und Kollegen,

nachfolgend findet Ihr einen Call for Papers (unten sowie auch als PDF
angehängt) für eine Sitzung mit dem Titel

„Lost in Post-Fossil Transformations“

auf der RGS-IGB Annual International Conference 2026  in London (1.–4.
September 2026). Bei Interesse, sendet bitte Vortragstitel
und Abstract (bis zu 250 Wörter) bis 13. Februar 2026 an Amy Walker
(amy.walker at geo.uni-halle.de) und Jan Winkler
(jan.winkler at geo.uni-halle.de).

Die Sitzung folgt dem klassischen Vortragsformat (Einzelvorträge von ca.
15 Minuten, ausschließlich in Präsenz). Bei allen Fragen
können gerne melden

Mit besten Grüßen
Amy und Jan

(Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg; Just Transition Center,
JTC)

 

Lost in Post-Fossil Transformations

Socio-ecological transformations towards more sustainable, post-fossil,
and just societies currently unfold through contentious
and ongoing negotiations. Transformation is never only about turning
towards something new; it also entails turning away from
established practices, infrastructures, and ways of life. The escalating
climate crisis and associated phase-outs and policy
shifts foreground processes of disappearance, in which certain domains
must be dismantled or discontinued. In this sense,
transformation produces experiential forms of loss (Reckwitz 2024) and
creates the conditions for emerging societal modes of
farewell, letting go, or dealing with “transition pain” (Bogner et al.
2024). Developing further debates on emotional dimensions
of sustainability transitions, this session focuses on how practices,
affects, politics, and spaces of loss are implicated in
transformative contexts, shaping socio-political relations and future
pathways.

Loss has been discussed in geography, for example in relation to
ecological loss and damage in a climate-changed world (Cunsolo &
Landmann 2017; Hepach & Hertz 2023), as well as in studies of
deindustrialisation, ruination, and vacancy (Meier 2012; Rohse et
al. 2020; Zhang 2024). Only very recently have the first explicit
attempts been formulated to conceptualize the “geographies of
loss” (Runkel & Schramm 2024). To delimit an otherwise broad field, the
session focuses on current socio-ecological
transformations, including sustainability transitions, climate policies,
and shifts away from fossil-based ways of being. At the
same time, it approaches transformation more broadly as a situated and
lived experience, and therefore resists tying
transformation-related losses too narrowly to fixed objects or dominant
narratives such as deindustrialisation or ecological
collapse. Instead, the session foregrounds loss as dispersed, unevenly
materialising, and socially differentiated, emerging within
wider societal shifts and power relations. Contributions may explore how
loss accompanies transformation from the
outset—anticipated when change is envisioned or engineered, reactivated
through past experiences, or expressed as mourning for
futures that never materialised.

 Against the backdrop of dominant narratives of progress, spaces for
collective engagement with loss are often limited (Elliott
2018; Reckwitz 2024). This session therefore asks how practices and
spaces of loss might enable social participation in
transformation, and whether engaging with loss can open ethical and
political perspectives for shaping just transitions. Loss
raises difficult questions about the legitimacy of holding on and about
how politically problematic sentiments—such as claims that
“things were better before”—can be addressed without slipping into
nostalgic or reactionary positions, or arguing about the moral
order of societal ‘losers’ and what legitimacy groups have for trying to
“hold on”. Yet if loss can function as a corrective to
one-sided logics of progress, or as a critique of sustainability’s
tendency toward preservation (rather than toward exploring
progressive forms of letting go; Elliott 2018), we invite contributions
that exmobilised in critical and progressive ways.

We invite theoretical, empirical, and methodological interventions
addressing questions such as

 * What are societal modes of (doing) loss, beyond the domains of death,
funeral, and established forms of mourning? Through what
   practices is a fossil life mourned
 * How can we conceive of the political, ethical, and analytical
potential of loss? Do related practices of bidding farewell,
   letting go (Bogner et al. 2024) or mourning (Cunsolo and Landmann
2017) help us understand loss as a shared and affective
   practice?
 * Who decides what is mournable loss? Who has the capacity to ‘let go’,
and who does not? What are the uneven ecologies of loss?
   What are the ethics of these power dynamics and efforts to label
attachments as cruel optimisms or backwards-looking (Berlant
   2011)?
 * What can be more-than-human perspectives on loss (Moulton 2021;
Tschakert et. al 2023; Phillips et al. 2023)? Besides
   ecological losses: can we – or should we – also mourn closing power
plants, industrial infrastructures, and fossil machines?
 * How do subjects deal with loss? What are the practices and relational
spaces of consolation and processing loss (Jedan,
   Maddrell and Venbrux 2019)?
 * Is there a spatial discharge (Anderson 2009) of loss, grief and
consolation?  What spatial configurations –
   couplings/decouplings, connections/separations, gaps, fractures –
constitute what kind of losses (for whom) – and what
   capacities to process them (Maddrell 2016; Griffiths 2021; Rohse et
al. 2020; Zhang 2024)? To what extend do intersecting
   layers of loss influence perceptions and practices of transformation?
 * What socio-spatial relations shape the ability to (re-)connect the
disconnected, reconcile the fractured, or re-orient
   disappearance? How might this spatial perspective contribute to a
politics of loss within just transitions?

 References

·  Anderson, B. (2009). Affective atmospheres. Emotion, Space and
Society, 2, 77–81.

·  Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press.

·  Bogner, K., Kump, B., Beekman, M., Wittmayer, J. (2024). Coping with
transition pain: An emotions perspective on phase-outs in
sustainability transitions. Environmental Innovation and Societal
Transitions, 50, 100806.

·  Cunsolo, Ashlee & Landman, Karen (Ed.). (2017). Mourning Nature. Hope
at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief. Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press.

·  Elliott, R. (2018). The sociology of climate change as a sociology of
loss. European Journal of Sociology, 69(3), 301–337.

·  Griffiths, H. M. (2021). Enacting memory and grief in poetic
landscapes. Emotion, Space and Society, 41, 100822.

·  Hepach, A. & Hartz, F. (2023). What is lost from climate change?
Phenomenology at the “limits to adaptation”. Geographica
Helvetica, 78, 211–221.

·  Jedan, C., Maddrell, A. & Venbrux, E. (Ed.). (2020).
Consolationscapes in the Face of Loss. Grief and Consolation in Space
and
Time. Abingdon.

·  Maddrell, A. (2016). Mapping grief: A conceptual framework for
understanding the spatial dimensions of bereavement, mourning
and remembrance. Social & Cultural Geography, 17(2), 166–188.

·  Meier, L. (2012). Encounters with haunted industrial workplaces and
emotions of loss: Class-related senses of place within the
memories of metalworkers. Cultural Geographies, 20(4), 467–483.

·  Moulton, J. V. (2021). The matter of mapping multispecies
entanglements of mourning—A manifesto’s shout, an orca’s tour of
grief. Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, 2(1), 99–119.

·  Phillips, C., Atchison, J. & Straughan, E. (2023). The power of
lament: Reckoning with loss in an urban forest. Environment and
Planning E: Nature and Space, 6(4), 2358–2378.

·  Reckwitz, A. (2024). Verlust – Ein Grundproblem der Moderne.
Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp.

·  Rohse, M., Day, R. & Llewellyn, D. (2020). Towards an emotional
energy geography. Geoforum, 1·  Runkel, S. & Schramm, M. (2024- ongoing): Special Issue “Geographien
des Verlusts“. Geographica Helvetica.
https://gh.copernicus.org/articles/special_issue1303.html, 22.01.26

·  Tschakert, P., du Coudray, C. & Horwitz, P. (2023). Walking journeys
into everyday climatic-affective atmospheres. Environment
and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2023, 1–23.

·  Zhang, V. (2024). Embodying industrial transitions: Melancholy loss,
interrupted habit and transitional memory after the end of
a coal mine. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers,
50(2), 1–15.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ak-feministische-geographien.org/pipermail/news/attachments/20260126/1abd66b9/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Call_RGSCfP_Lost in Transformation.pdf
Type: application/pdf
Size: 289129 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.ak-feministische-geographien.org/pipermail/news/attachments/20260126/1abd66b9/attachment-0001.pdf>